Informed Speculation

For my older readers, that’s gangsta for kill this dog.  In an earlier post, I rightly ridiculed Paul Krugman for laying down his credibility in an incredibly transparent attempt to shill for the Obama administration’s upcoming cap-and-trade debacle.  Krugman’s piece was remarkable mainly for one reason – he made no attempt to justify the cost [...]

Smile – you now own General Motors!  Most of it, anyway…but you overpaid tremendously. The current market capitalization of General Motors is a pathetic $684 million. The government is picking up its stake for a mere $42 billion, including the $19.4 billion already loaned ($8 billion in government loans will remain on the books).  Translation: [...]

It can kill a blog to go dark for extended periods, so forgive my considerable absence.  It signifies nothing more than a need for a break – but perhaps I should have at least delivered a head’s-up. The three big stories for me right now are the Sotomayor nomination, the pending GM bankruptcy, and the [...]

The Washington Post reports that – as has seemed fairly certain for a few months now – General Motors will enter bankruptcy next week – ironically, perhaps at nearly the same moment Chrysler is lifted out: The Obama administration is preparing to send General Motors into bankruptcy next week under a plan that would give [...]

Marc Ambinder has an interesting take on the revolt of the Senate when it came to closing Gitmo: As usual, administration officials won’t concede that the overwhelming Senate vote against funding to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay was a defeat for the president’s agenda.  In Obama World, every short-term defeat is a long-term opportunity. [...]

My long-time readers know that I am an unapologetic, die-hard free-market capitalist.  Though I take occasional contrary stances (automaker bailouts, for example), I’m pretty firm in my belief that the market is primarily an agent of good, the present crisis notwithstanding. However, I greatly applaud the move by the Senate to advance the bill curbing [...]

This excerpt requires no commentary from me: It has been the nightmare scenario ever since the modern system of congressional oversight of intelligence was created in the late 1970s: When a scandal erupts, a member of congress will put his (or her) political interests above those of the intelligence agency whose secrets he (or she) [...]

UPDATE 05/15/09: I’m taking the rare step of bumping this post back up top, as there has been a lively give and take in the comments and the Nancy Pelosi angle has thrown this story into high relief… __________________________________________ It’s been well-established from newspaper reports, including work by the NY Times (wrong – I misremembered, [...]

When summer comes around, and a hot-natured person like myself wonders why the hell he chose to live in a place where the average daily high is over 90 for four straight months, it’s easy to forget what first brought me and so many others to this place.  For some, it’s the natural beauty of [...]

How about that Andrew Sullivan?  The most overrated, overpaid, and overexposed blogger on the planet has decided he’s had enough of Barack Obama and has tagged him with the ultimate epithet – wait for it – neocon (gasp!).  I kid you not.  From the overexcited one himself, from a post so brief I can’t excerpt [...]

We’re all familiar with these little nuggets of wisdom, some serious (Moore’s Law), some somewhat facetious but still reflective of some larger truth (Godwin’s Law). Of course, I have no way of checking the thousands of these already in existence to see if this duplicates an existing Law, but I hereby propose Coffey’s Law of [...]

President Obama has upped the stakes on the AfPak front with his dismissal of the old-school commander in Afghanistan and his replacement with a Petraeus-style counterinsurgency expert.  Fred Kaplan says the move definitively makes this Obama’s war now: Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced this afternoon that he has “asked for the resignation” of Gen. David [...]

Barack Obama came to the presidency riding a wave of good will unseen since Ronald Reagan replaced the hapless Jimmy Carter.  He talked of sacrifice incessantly during his first major speech to Congress…but during that same speech he made it clear that the talk of sacrifice was just speech-writing artifice, as he went on to [...]

Let’s see now – regarding the use of coercive techniques on terrorist suspects – otherwise known as the torture debate – this is going to put a bit of a damper on the “try Bush for war crimes” parade: A new national poll indicates that most Americans don’t want to see an investigation of Bush [...]

Instead of bankruptcy, which seemed an absolute certainty, a new plan is afoot in General Motors land to issue 60 billion (!) new shares of common stock, followed by a 1-for-100 reverse stock split. The upshot? Current shareholders would own only 1% of the company, rather than their current 100%. The other part of the [...]

Today, part 1: Pass a climate protection bill that raises the electric rates of every American substantially (and thus, for all practical purposes, puts the lie to Obama’s promises only to raise taxes on the rich). Now, I haven’t fisked an article in a long, long time, but this doozy from Paul Krugman is begging [...]

Jack Kemp was a man who was easy to like.  Of course, I never met him personally, but his public persona was optimistic and he famously argued for the need for Republicans to have a ‘big tent’ philosophy.  His other (political) claim to fame was his advocacy of tax cuts and supply-side economics.  All of [...]

…is the fact that most Bush administration policies on the War on Terror have been continued by the Obama administration.  Now, in and of itself, that doesn’t prove the policies are right, but it puts vehement critics of Bush who were in rapture at the thought of the coming of Obama in a bit of [...]